IDLE GROUNDS by Krystelle Bamford

Make room in your tree-house, Max Porter. There’s a new literary weirdo in town. Krystelle Bamford’s debut pulses with the same surreal mix of menace, charm and whimsy I’ve come to associate with Porter, though Idle Grounds is very much its own beguiling creature.

Set over the course of single day in the late 1980s, it tells of a family birthday party in New England gone horrible awry. From the outset, it drips with gothic dread. Ten kids - all cousins - are looking out the window (VC Andrews style) when they spy a strange creature in the woods. Their minds fully focused, they don’t notice three-year-old Abi wander off until it’s too late. Her brother, Travis, races into the woods to find her but he too disappears.

What follows is the desperate search by the remaining kids, as seen through the eyes of the seven-year-old narrator, broken up by short interlude chapters recounting the disturbing family history. Bamford proves herself an instant master of tone and pacing; it is often difficult to distinguish between genuine horrors and the conflations of a child’s mind. And while the end may seem tragic, its particulars remain open to interpretation. Delightfully unsettling.

Idle Grounds by Krystelle Bamford
Hutchinson Heinemann, 2025
176 pages